I hope I am putting this question in the right place because this is more of a content then code question.

I am new to making external list, so my question is, will the external list I have connected to my SQL database table update itself with the new data put into the database, or will I have to run some type of a timer job or something to update the external list. I need to be able to grab data in real time ( if possible ) from my database and load it into the external list.

Is there a way to do this? Also, what would be the best practices to do so?

2 Answers
2

External Lists are updated runtime, all data is sync and there is no need to run any job/service to sync data between External List and your SQL database!

Its just a PAGE REFRESH will be needed if the page was already open :)

So either you add data from SharePoint Form or any other resource to database, they both are sync... Because each time you open External List view, it actually gets data from database, it has no local storage/cache anywhere else!

If you want that page remains open and new data is shown [to make it feel real time].. you can put simple javascript to reload the page every X seconds...